Do yourself a favor — take a nap

Dr. Todd Swick, medical director of the Houston Sleep Center, relaxes in one of his research bedrooms in Houston, where the facility diagnoses and treats people who have problems sleeping.

Dr. Todd Swick, medical director of the Houston Sleep Center, relaxes in one of his research bedrooms in Houston, where the facility diagnoses and treats people who have problems sleeping.

Photo: Johnny Hanson /Chronicle

Photo: Johnny Hanson /Chronicle

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Dr. Todd Swick, medical director of the Houston Sleep Center, relaxes in one of his research bedrooms in Houston, where the facility diagnoses and treats people who have problems sleeping.

Dr. Todd Swick, medical director of the Houston Sleep Center, relaxes in one of his research bedrooms in Houston, where the facility diagnoses and treats people who have problems sleeping.

Photo: Johnny Hanson /Chronicle

Do yourself a favor — take a nap

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We might think it’s essential to stay up late to finish that work project or prepare that presentation. But it turns out stopping work in time to wind down and get a good night’s sleep may be a far better way to improve productivity and performance.

“If you’re sleep-deprived, you’re more vulnerable to crankiness, irritability, and challenges coping with stress,” says Lauren Hale, associate professor of Preventive Medicine, Program in Public Health, Stony Brook University. “Sleep and stress can also create a nasty cycle. Anxiety makes it harder to fall asleep, and then lack of sleep makes us more sensitive to the pressures of everyday life.”

Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School, has discovered in a wide range of sleep studies dating almost 40 years that nighttime sleep and dreaming promote learning, memory consolidation and greater creativity. Stickgold has also shown in newer experiments that daytime naps may do as much good for memory processing as a full night’s sleep. “They even seem to trump coffee as a workday pick-me up,” he says. “Caffeine does boost cognitive power for up to a half hour, but sleep is actually taking the recent information that you’ve learned and filing it away for you so you can more effectively take in new information.”

I can vouch for that. In my last job, I was fortunate to have my own office. Sometimes, instead of going out for lunch with friends or co-workers, I’d stretch out on the carpeted floor and take a power nap of 15 or 20 minutes. It did more for my energy level than a hamburger and french fries. Now that I’m retired, I often catch my naps during the evening news on TV.

According to the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort study, people who sleep fewer than six hours at night are more likely to be overweight. Researchers recently have also identified a strong connection between lack of sleep and increased risk for developing Type 2 diabetes. The medical journal Lancet urges doctors to motivate their patients to enjoy sufficient sleep to prevent and treat both obesity and diabetes.

There is no magic number when it comes to getting enough sleep. Different people function better by sleeping on different schedules. It’s reported that Leonardo da Vinci created the Mona Lisa on two hours of sleep a day, broken up into 15-minute naps every four hours, but Albert Einstein took 10 hours of sleep each night, as well as daytime naps!

Feeling exhausted during the day could be a red flag that you aren’t sleeping enough at night. Daytime drowsiness is more than a nuisance. It’s a major public health problem. The National Institute of Health estimates at least 30 percent of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived, with potentially deadly consequences. Nodding off at the wheel is estimated to cause up to 6,000 traffic fatalities a year, according to the Center for Disease Control.

The amount of sleep you need increases if you have been deprived of sleep in previous days, researchers say. Getting too little sleep creates a “sleep debt,” like being overdrawn at a bank. Eventually, your body demands the debt be repaid.